Fedora 41 Workstation VM is unusable after Mesa 3D library updates are installed

[Technogeezer]

If you're running a Fedora 41 Workstation VM with the GNOME desktop environment on any VMware desktop hypervisor -- Fusion (on both Intel and Apple Silicon) or Workstation -- don't upgrade them if they're working. If you do, you'll find that the gdm greeter no longer displays - you are faced with a blank screen. The only way to log in is to switch to another virtual console in the VM or to boot the VM to a multi-user target (not graphical target). 

The cause of this problem appears to be the Mesa 3D 24.3.2 packages that are now being distributed by Fedora. Changes have been made that breaks them working with the VMware SVGA II graphics (Linux vmwgfx driver). 

To work around the problem, you can either disable the vmwgfx driver in the VM, or use dnf to downgrade the Mesa libraries back to 24.2.x. You may need to drop into multi-user mode at boot to perform the dnf commands needed to downgrade the Mesa libraries. I'd also suggest modifying /etc/dnf/dnf.conf in the VM to prevent all Mesa packages from being updated until this issue is fixed. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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[Brian Paul]

As I mentioned in the other thread, I fixed this a few days ago.  To downgrade to the 24.2.x driver, the specific command to run is "sudo dnf install mesa-dri-drivers-24.2.4-1.fc41.x86_64"

[Technogeezer]

Mesa 24.3.4-2 has just been pushed a an update to Fedora 41 stable and Rawhide. It addresses this issue.

New installations will no longer have the problem. Existing Fedora 41 VMs should upgrade to obtain the fix, 

There is one small quirk left when 3D acceleration is enabled for the VM and you're using Wayland. The gdm greeter will show its menu bar, but the Fedora logo appears dimmed and the user prompt will not appear. Resizing the VM window slightly will cause the gdm login greeter to appear as you'd expect. I've found that everything still works as expected in the GNOME session. (I suspect there's an issue with GNOME and mutter as there's been a lot of changes in Wayland/mutter lately).  

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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[gbohn]

Thanks for the heads-up.

I just created a FC 41 Guest and saw the same thing (Under Workstation 17.5.2 and Windows 11 23H2 Host).

When it updated (shortly after install) it broke the GUI ability to start.

Down-leveling mesa-dri-driver  (and the other associated entries it reverted) from 24.3.3 made it work after a fashion again for me, but without 3D acceleration. I'm getting some graphical artifacts. but I'm unsure if that's related or not.

But even worse, my Guest sound seems very broken. Does sound work o.k. for anyone else in this environment?